


scrapbook

by SkadizzleRoss



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Violence, Cabin Fic, Connor (Detroit: Become Human) Whump, Connor Deserves Happiness, Couch Cuddles, Deviant Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Deviant Upgraded Connor | RK900, Drama & Romance, Hank Anderson & Connor Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Look It's Basically a Hallmark Movie (With Violence!), M/M, POV Upgraded Connor | RK900, Post-Peaceful Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Snowed In, Soft Upgraded Connor | RK900, They're Marrieds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21955543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkadizzleRoss/pseuds/SkadizzleRoss
Summary: The assignment's a deceptively simple one. Interview a long-lost revolutionary leader: RK800-52, 'Connor'.There's only a handful of problems. First, he's been in hiding for years, and would prefer to stay that way. Second, he's playing host to a malicious AI, one that's loyal to a cause that no longer exists.And one other minor thing - Nines seems to be falling in love with him.
Relationships: Connor/Upgraded Connor | RK900
Comments: 9
Kudos: 145
Collections: New ERA Discord: Winter Big Bang





	scrapbook

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays! This fic features some spectacular art by [greed / kingkirkwall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingkirkwall/pseuds/greed)! Click [here](https://imgur.com/a/8IFVpKr) for some detail shots. Thanks for the beautiful work, g.reed!
> 
> This work is part of the Winter Big Bang for the New ERA Discord, which you can join by clicking the invite [here](https://discord.gg/GqvNzUm).
> 
> Thanks also to [Cosmoscorpse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmoscorpse/pseuds/cosmoscorpse) for their help ironing out the details (and whump :)c ) on this concept!

_It’s been a few years since the book._

_The RK800, an android of myth and legend, condensed down into a hundred thousand words. But that’s the newsstand version, trimmed for clarity and security and the comfort of human and android readers alike._

_These are the pieces that didn’t make it into that story. Scraps that I’ve come back to again and again over the years._

_Some of the most critical things, and the least._

_(But that’s all relative, isn’t it? The least consequential things - those are the important parts. That’s what I’ve learned.)_

_I’ll tell it in my usual way, if you don’t mind._

+++

North herself gave him the assignment.

Her desk was this gigantic Federalist affair, meant to impose. Nines was almost inclined to believe she’d broken into the White House and stolen the Resolute desk itself, as was one of several rumors surrounding Markus’s right-hand lieutenant.

The effect was somewhat diminished by the small collection of solar-powered toys bobbing away on the high-polish of the desk’s surface. She had to sweep some of these aside so she could perch on the desk’s edge and look Nines over more carefully.

She said, “You come highly recommended. I read your piece about the evolution of android personhood.”

Nines asked, “Did you like it?”

She tilted her head. “It was entertaining.”

Which he took as a no.

North passed him the assignment - an encrypted file, interface-only - and leaned back on her palms, smiling in wry amusement as Nines’ eyebrows rose.

“It won’t be a problem, will it?" she asked. "I hear you like digging.”

“So far, all you have is gossip with a side of rumors.”

Both of them a plague in android society; rapidly transmitted, eagerly collected. The more illogical they were, the more appealing they were to the androids peddling them.

Nines did his fair share of collecting; he liked rumors. He liked finding the seeds of truth in them.

“It’ll take time,” North admitted. “But you’ve got whatever resources Jericho can provide, within reason. I'm sure I don’t have to tell you to be discreet."

Nines closed the file. “Are you hiring me as a journalist or a private investigator?”

“Both,” she said cheerfully, and ushered him out the door.

Hank Anderson ghosted him.

Another inconsequential detail, but an amusing one.

The lieutenant agreed to a meeting by e-mail, but come the time and arranged place, Nines was waiting by an empty desk in Central Station and attracting a few stares of his own. He sent the lieutenant several texts, and received no reply.

Sergeant Gavin Reed was the one to actually approach him. Most of the detectives and beat cops were maneuvering around him, circling like curious moths, but Gavin Reed approached him head-on and announced, “Holy shit.”

Nines waited for a more polite attempt at an introduction, but the detective simply sipped at his coffee, appraising him. “I didn’t know they made any more of you.”

“I’m not an RK800.”

“Yeah, I can see that—” There was probably a curse hanging on his lips, but his words stalled out as Nines rose to his full height, putting the shorter man on his back foot.

“Perhaps you can help me,” Nines said.

Reed squared his shoulders. “Depends.”

“I’m looking for the RK800 that Lieutenant Anderson worked with during the revolution.”

“Connor?”

“That was his assigned name, yes. I’m looking for -52, specifically.”

Gavin seemed genuinely amused by this. “Well, shit. No wonder the lieutenant skipped out on you.”

“I was under the impression Lieutenant Anderson and Connor were close,” Nines said, with a lilt of confusion.

“Sure. But he gets folks snooping around occasionally. Fans, y’know. Can’t say I see the obsession,” Gavin said, swiping a hand across the back of his neck. “So hey, what the hell are you?”

“I’m the upgrade,” Nines replied.

“The _upgrade,_ ” Gavin drawled, but the sarcasm did little to obscure his wariness.

“Will you assist me in trying to get a lead on RK800-52? Connor, that is.” Humans got confused, sometimes. “I’d be willing to pay time-and-a-half for your work.”

Reed answered, “Yeah, sure, what the hell,” which was about as binding a contract as Nines supposed he would get.

Two weeks later, Sergeant Reed sent him a field report from Cora, Wyoming - an overzealous concerned citizen who’d contacted the police about ‘that android from the TV’ in January 2039 - and a neat list of billable hours.

(Hank did not express regret about their missed meeting. He never responded at all.)

The RK800 wasn’t in Cora. It took another week and a half of canvassing every town in the vicinity before Nines got lucky, in the most fundamental sense: he walked into a general store in Freemont, Wyoming, and the cashier announced, “Bit early for you, isn’t it, Con?”

Nine set down a snowglobe and turned to face the cashier in full, smiling in polite confusion. “I’m sorry?”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re another android fella.”

Weeks of combing through four years’ of hearsay and rumor, and he simply walked into the right store. It wasn't his first time suspecting North hired him for more than his journalist credentials.

“I’m looking for an android,” Nine said. “One that looks quite a lot like me. Brown eyes?”

“Spitting image of you,” the cashier - Janie Waldrop - informed him, “but he’s bound to be snowed in soon. You can find him up at the Monahan place. Here, are you heading up? Would you mind?”

She piled his arms high with foil packets of Thirium 310 and a brown paper package wrapped in purple tinsel. He thanked her and took his leave.

The autocab stopped a half-mile short of the Monahan property itself, impeded by mounting snow and a metal gate marked _No Trespassing & Absolutely No Hunting!_

‘Up’ turned out to be at the top of a ridge overlooking the lakes, the high-altitude meadows interrupted with an occasional scrubby tree. He knew it was a decent view in the springtime, but only because he cross-referenced archived images as he walked. All he could see as he climbed that day was an unmarked plain of white butting up against a gray wall of obscuring cloud.

The snow rose from his shins to his thighs as he went, slowing his progress to a crawl. Nines fretted for awhile that the RK800 might not even be home, or worse, that he’d be the _wrong_ RK800.

Records indicated -51 was destroyed, -60 deactivated and never slated for repair; the remaining seven RK800s had been left in storage out of respect for the unique continuity of the RK800 line.

Nines had swung a ten-minute conversation with Markus himself over wireless, and one of the things he'd said was, _We could’ve used his help, after._

He’d thought it strange. They’d had seven of him available.

Markus had described it as _a matter of respect._ He’d ended the conversation on much the same: _If you do find him, be mindful of that._

_Respect him, and whatever life he’s chosen._

He did no such thing, of course.

The first words the long-lost founding father of the revolution said to him was: “You look lost.” Gloved hands steepled on a snow shovel, watching Nines from behind a wrought iron gate.

“Do I? I’m not.”

“I can’t think of any other reason you’d be walking in this," the RK800 said.

“The road is closed.”

“Because it’s snowing.”

“I don’t mind walking.”

“It’s cold.”

“That doesn’t bother me.”

“Good,” he said. “Then you can get back.”

And then he picked up the shovel and turned to leave.

Nines stepped up to the fence.

“If you were some sort of hermit archetype,” he began, popping the latch on the gate as he spoke, “this would be the point where you’re testing my resolve by turning me away.”

At the time, Nines thought nothing of the microsecond-lag in the RK800’s turn to face him.

A brief look to the left, to the vague clump of a rose bush buried in snow.

(Listening, as she said: _So they’ve sent your replacement. Whatever does he want from you?_

He dismissed her curtly.)

Then he regarded Nines, standing there while the fresh snow dulled the crisp lines of his shoveling.

Connor stood and watched him, even though he _was_ cold, very. He wasn’t designed for this climate, not like Nines. The RK800 had a light build and efficient heat dissipation. He was designed for quick, agile movement in a primarily urban environment.

“What should I call you?” Nines asked.

“What do you want?” the RK800 parried.

“An introduction, first.”

“And after that?”

“We can get to that.”

The RK800 looked him over, and appeared to find him lacking.

(The RK800 looked him over, and thought, _They made this one arrogant._

_No,_ Amanda answered coolly. _That was a leftover from the previous generation.)_

When the RK800 wasn’t forthcoming with an introduction or a dismissal, Nines hazarded his own: “Do you still go by Connor?”

( _Does he have a garden?_ Connor asked.

 _I don’t know,_ Amanda said, and she may have even been honest about this.)

He didn’t protest, so Nines took this as a yes.

Curious. There were plenty of androids that kept some variation of their assigned names, but there were plenty more that sought out varied and occasionally eccentric alternatives.

Connor leaned the snow shovel up on the porch. There was a sprig of holly hanging from the porch light, the stems wrapped in twine.

“My name is Nines 87,” he said, thinking maybe Connor had grown comfortable with the silence, out here in the muffling snowfall. “I’m a journalist. I’m working on compiling the stories of formative figures in the Android Revolution.”

“Stories?” Connor said.

“Biographies,” Nines corrected.

“I’m not interested in telling stories,” Connor replied, and slammed the door in his face.

The holly sprig lost a few berries in the process.

Nines piled the packages neatly on the front porch and sat beside them, elbows on his knees. He checked his e-mail. He drafted several versions of these first impressions, and deleted all of them. He considered informing North that he'd located -52, but ultimately decided against it.

He wandered to the edge of the cabin’s yard, peering up at the Monahan place properly through the trees. The bulky aesthetics of a log cabin bent and warped into a vaulted cathedral-style affair. 

The mansion was large and cold and hollow, dwarfing the small standalone in-laws’ suite that they had provided to their groundskeeper. Connor’s residence was a small thing, but light pooled warm on the windowsills, and smoke curled out of the chimney.

Nines looked, and he sat, and he waited. When the snow piled up against the tops of his boots, he picked up the shovel and cleared the path.

Six hours - five hours and 53 minutes, to be precise - elapsed before Connor cracked the door open again.

He looked at the cleared path. He looked at Nines, leaning on the snow shovel in a mimic of his earlier pose.

He scowled, and said, “You aren’t frozen.”

“I was designed for deployment in the Arctic. I have upgraded thermoregulation capabilities. I can continue at this rate for another week, although I may have to dip into your thirium supplies.”

Connor glanced down at the pile of packages on the porch, his scowl deepening.

He picked them up and went inside. He didn’t close the door.

Nines took this as invitation enough.

“This isn’t resolve,” Connor said, as Nines toed his boots off in the small mudroom. “It’s willful stupidity. You’re going to warm up and go home.”

“It’s snowed quite a lot.”

“Lucky you were designed for this, then,” Connor muttered. He set the small brown package on the kitchen counter and went to store the thirium away in the fridge.

The room was done out in floor-to-ceiling hardwood, even the ceiling beams carved out with a calculated rough-hewn aesthetic. All of it seemed to swallow up the heat from the stove and throw it right back over a small couch piled with blankets, a kitchen table decorated with a small vase of dried flowers and seed pods.

It was cozy, he decided. A small, warm place, carved out of a frigid mountainside. If you set aside the multi-million-dollar monstrosity next door, it was quaint.

Nines shrugged out of his damp jacket, shook the snow from the cuffs of his pants and walked to the kitchen table.

Connor paid him little mind. He knelt by the wood stove, prodding the fire into life.

“There’s been reported sightings of you in Belarus, South Africa, Greenland,” Nines began conversationally. “Alaska or Puerto Rico, at the very least, if you were still in the US.”

“Mm.”

“None of those rumors included you still having your LED.”

Connor glanced up from the fire, but there was no shift in the passive blue on his temple. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“Oh, there’s nothing wrong with the LED." He tapped his own, which he'd chosen to keep. "It’s a fantasy, I think. The androids fabricating these stories liked to assume you had blended in. Found a way to live truly human.”

And in a way he had, more or less. Something small and humble and quiet.

Eventually, Connor sat at the table opposite him. He picked up a fir pinecone leaning against the vase and ran his thumb across the paper-thin scales.

Nines was inclined to wait.

When Connor began, his voice was firm. “I like it here.”

“I can see why,” Nines said.

Connor set the pinecone aside, looking up at him with a steady gaze. “My conditions are this: I answer the questions I want to answer. I’ll only discuss the events of the revolution, up to and including Hart Plaza on November 11th. But not past that. When I’ve answered your questions, you leave. You don’t come back, and you don’t inform anyone of my whereabouts. And before I answer anything, I want you to turn your network access off.”

Nines nodded, and did so. Not a particularly unusual request, although it usually came from paranoid humans, not other androids. He offered his hand across the table, withdrawing the synthskin. “It’s off. If you’d like to confirm?”

Connor kept his hands neatly folded in front of him, ignoring Nines’ interface offering. “I’ll have to trust you.”

“Alright. I suppose you have your own access disabled?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been cut off like this?”

“That’s outside the terms of our agreement.”

“Right. Sorry.” Nines ran a few quick adjustments before pulling a small tablet from the inner pocket of his coat; it was one he usually reserved for human interviewees. A quick press of his thumb got the file neatly transferred. “This is a standard contract. I’ve already amended it for your requests.”

Connor scrolled through the document manually. It took him seconds longer than it would have, if he’d just downloaded the file the easy way.

“This section on interfacing,” he said. “Delete that.”

“It’s a fairly common practice, these days. There’s protocols, of course, I can only see what you’ve given express permission for me to view, and then only if you access the files for me--”

“No,” Connor said. “No interfacing.”

“If you want me out of here quickly, interfacing is the most expedient option.”

“Delete it, please.”

So he did. He amended the section to read, _No interface, unless expressly requested by the interviewee._

Nines leaned back in his chair, watched as Connor read the contract through a second time. “I haven’t written a project of this depth without interfacing, before.”

“What sort of depth are you expecting?” Connor asked absently.

Nines smiled to himself. Basking for a moment in the reality of it: sitting across a kitchen table from an android that he’d only ever heard of as a legend, only ever seen in news clips.

“I’m not sure yet.”

He sat in the drowsy warmth of an idyllic cabin and watched the android who’d delivered the killing blow to the CyberLife-that-was glance up from the tablet. Despite all of his guarded irascibility, there was a quick, fleeting moment where his expression was open, curious.

He handed the signed contract back. His signature was still CyberLife Sans, pin-neat.

“Would you like to start now?” Nines asked, as Connor pushed away from the table.

“No. Tomorrow. You can rest on the couch.”

And then he disappeared into the back room with a soft click of the door latch.

By the morning, the snow had reached the window ledges and begun curling around the panes.

Connor stared at this like it was some personal affront.

“They were calling for three additional feet,” Nines commented. No internet connection, of course; maybe no weather reports, either, although he had noticed a radio on the kitchen counter for picking up emergency bands.

“And you still walked up here?” Connor said.

“I don’t like to let leads go stale.”

Connor turned away from the window, muttering, “I wasn’t going anywhere."

“And now neither am I. Should we get started?”

“Where should we start?”

“I was thinking Lieutenant Anderson.”

Connor fell silent, long enough for Nines to prompt: “Unless you’d rather start with the Phillips case.”

“No--" he settled into the chair, lacing his fingers in the tabletop. "No, let’s start with the lieutenant.”

Interviews around the crackling fire. It was charmingly classic.

Well, no: it was frustrating and piecemeal.

Connor vetoed questions without rhyme or reason, and proved nearly as avoidant as the lieutenant himself regarding their partnership. He refused to be idly led into talk of Lieutenant Anderson’s personal life, staying frustratingly close to what was already well-known from previous interviews and press releases.

Hours became days, but Nines persevered.

When Connor grew tired of answering questions, Nines had no option but to wait.

The snow was still high; he was getting paid, and paid _well_ for this assignment. He had plenty of other projects to work on, in the meantime. A dozen manuscripts floating around his head, short editorials and longer think-pieces, the vague shape of a long-form non-fiction piece regarding aging YKs that he’d been poking at in recent months.

Connor asked to see his work, and Nines provided a choice selection, character pieces and introspectives, a series of biography pieces on critical pre-deviancy figures, human or android. Rose Chapman and the like.

Connor read them all. 

Connor had his _rules_ , of course, and Nines abided by them for the most part. Connor refused to hear anything about post-revolution CyberLife, or Jericho politics, or android-government relations.

But he would accommodate information about the mundane, day-to-day things. He listened with interest to the small, petty squabbles that had formed within androidkind, these days. Questions of modification and modesty, love and identity. How androids had attempted to categorize and stratify themselves by arbitrary things; who deviated them, and how, or did they deviate themselves? Before or after the revolution?

Being woken by _Markus himself_ , that was, of course, a top tier among the post-revolution deviants.

Nines had no such claim. He was deviated before he was even fully aware, although he could argue that it was one of Elijah’s unique Chloe units - the one who’d fallen in charge of CyberLife’s remaining android inventory - who’d entered the code.

Either way, he awoke as he was and as he is, free-thinking.

Connor listened to all of this with interest, up until Nines added, “Of course, second to Markus, there’s the honor of being deviated by you.”

Connor went still, a blush creeping up his cheeks. “What?”

“The AP700s you brought from Belle Isle,” Nines explained. “They’re proud of that, being part of your awakening. You have quite a following. Outside of the conspiracy theories and rumors, of course.”

“Conspiracy theories?” Connor began, and then he shook his head. A single, sharp tic. “No. I don’t want to know.”

Nines knew he was going to have to ask about the stage, of course. About the gun. This was a line of questioning he suspected he would have to work up to.

So many rumors, and so many of them centered on that moment: a gun in hand for nine seconds, as his LED strobed red.

Here in a Wyoming cabin, Connor’s LED was nearly always a placid, circling blue.

A story formed piecemeal, over the course of days.

The shape of truths, underneath. Nines was coming to understand that Connor hadn't chosen this way of living; that this was some sort of penitence, some necessary thing.

That he enjoyed the company, in point of fact.

They spent hours on the couch, Connor buried beneath a multicolored fleece blanket and reading through the pieces Nines had provided. Nines leaned back, borrowed wool socks propped on the coffee table as he closed his eyes and wrote. More than a few of his human colleagues had expressed their eternal frustration with Nines’ ability to carry a pitch-perfect memory and word processor around in his head.

Occasionally Nines followed Connor around in his duties, helping him clear paths for visitors that wouldn’t be arriving, moving through the empty halls of the main house to check for any damage or problems, heating some rooms and cooling others.

It was during one of those mansion walkthroughs that Connor asked what Nines had done when he first woke.

“You worked in a warehouse,” Connor repeated.

“Only for a few months.”

“Did they know they were employing a military prototype?”

“No. It was a security job, to be fair. Jericho came close to a well-suited purpose in assigning me there. But the only thing I ever found were rats and a few bored teenagers.”

“Did you like it?”

“I didn’t think about it, at first," Nines said. "The other guards read on the job, left magazines scattered around. I started reading them, and I found I disagreed with a lot of what was being said in those days.

“So I started writing, too. I submitted anonymous letters to the editors. Eventually some of the news outlets asked if I’d like to join as an opinion columnist. Two or three of them didn’t even realize I was an android.”

Connor looked at him, eyebrows raised in the gloaming of the cathedral room. “You dodged my question.”

Which was something he accused Connor of often. He backtracked, chagrined. “It was interminably boring. I hated it.”

Connor liked his work.

He liked the Monahans, who were kind and well-meaning, if occasionally tone-deaf. (The brown package was a Christmas present, which Connor only opened after Nines’ repeated pestering. It contained what it usually contained: a Christmas card and a panettone, the latter wrapped in wax paper and topped with almonds. No one had updated the Monahans’ assistant on their groundskeeper’s inhuman leanings.)

There’s little to nothing in the book about that, partially because Nines’ editors anticipated the Monahans suing them out of existence if Nines included any of his more pointed opinions on their motivations in hiring an android groundskeeper, one that was unregistered, accepted subpar pay and still had an LED.

At least they’d stopped short of asking for the ACA compliant uniform.

Connor wore a vague variety of thrift store finds, corduroy and wool and cotton sweatshirts for ski resorts he'd never set foot on; quite a few of them overlarge and threadbare at the elbows and knees. He had some nicer, more closely-fitting summer and shoulder-season clothes for when the Monahans were around - many of them hand-me-downs from the Monahans’ younger son, who was nearly the right height - but otherwise, he seemed to prefer his more drab, well-worn collection.

His fashion choices worked in Nines’ favor, as well; he’d arrived with only the clothes on his back, so he ended up borrowing often. Sleeves that fell past Connor’s knuckles fit fairly snugly on him.

(There was a rationale to all this, Nines found out later.

First, he was perpetually cold, and layering in sweaters seemed to help with this; second, and more importantly, Amanda absolutely hated it.)

Connor liked his work; he liked the house, and he liked the yard, despite his predisposition to cold. 

He collected berries, interesting leaves, twigs contorted into interesting shapes.

He sang to himself, when he thought Nines had wandered too far to hear. Bits and pieces of out-of-date mainstream music, meandering jazz improvisations. All of it recreated with an intentional imperfection.

He liked the library. A large fireplace, sprawling leather armchairs. Connor had permission to borrow the books - all bound in identical white leather - but he didn’t, not very often. Nines made up for it, pulling each book down one-by-one and running a thumb over the gold-stamped binding. He’d read most of them before - it was far from an exotic selection - but he found he enjoyed turning the pages. 

Connor preferred to play chess. There was a board in the library, the pieces carved from stone. Nines watched him move all of the pieces himself. First marble, then red onyx, then marble again.

Nines asked who won, once, in jest. He was close enough to an uncomfortable truth that Connor’s smile was cold and unconvincing when he answered, “I did.”

(The preconstruction seated across from him adjusted the bangles on her wrists and folded her hands in her lap, looking down solemnly at her checkmated king.)

Connor beat Nines handily, the few times they faced off against each other. But mostly he was content to play by himself.

He spent most of his time playing chess, although Nines didn’t realize it at the time.

One evening Connor set Nines’ work aside and asked, “What do you want this book to be?”

Nines picked the tablet up to look at the open article; he’d just finished a character piece on a deviant from Louisiana. They’d survived five years before the revolution, primarily through the help of the custodian at a local school. They’d worked out a bartering system. The android helped the older woman with her cleaning at night, in exchange for the occasional bag of thirium stolen from the teachers’ stock.

It read almost like a fairy tale. Elves in the night, helping well-meaning cobblers accomplish their tasks.

Connor continued: “Is it going to be an explanation of what I did, or of who I am as a person?”

“What would you like it to be?” Nines asked.

“What I did is more important than who I am,” Connor answered, with dishearteningly little hesitation.

“I disagree.”

Connor smiled around the heavy weight of an unseen hand bearing into his shoulder. “You don’t know me well enough to have an informed opinion on that.”

And his smile faltered, uncertain, when Nines replied, “I’d like to.”

There were times when Connor’s blue calm slipped.

More and more moments where there was a tint of amber chasing through his LED, some internal pressure building.

Nines was never certain why. His demeanor didn’t shift; he remained quick-tongued and argumentative if Nines tried to pry more out of him than he wanted to say. His hands stayed steady. He showed no outward signs of stress at all.

Stranger still, it was mostly during their casual conversations. Meaningless things.

The most amusing was a day when they’d both attempted snowshoeing. It’d proven fairly easy to learn, although he did have to _learn_ it. No easy protocols to download. Inevitably Nines had misstepped and caught Connor’s decking with his own, sending them both down into the deep drifts.

When they returned to the cabin, Connor stripped out of his damp clothes, as Nines looked for a change of clothes for himself.

Modesty wasn’t much of a factor for most androids. There was less fretting involved when bodies were _designed._ But when Nines asked when Connor had gotten his modification, Connor stared at him with open surprise. “What modification?”

“Your genital component.”

Blue swung to yellow and Connor blinked, and glanced down. “I didn’t.”

“ _Oh._ ” Nines backtracked rapidly. “I’m sorry. Rude of me to presume.”

“Do you not have--?” Connor began hesitantly, blush creeping down his neck.

“No, that’s... not standard to my model.”

“Oh,” Connor echoed back.

Nines’ follow-up question of “Have you ever used it?” resulted in Connor kicking him out of the room entirely, along with a shouted, “This better not be in your book.”

“It’s not that kind of book,” Nines replied through the door.

Modesty, it turned out, was still a bit of a problem with the RK800.

Another yellow conversation: one in which Connor harassed him mercilessly for his first moonlighting job as a dating columnist.

“And _how_ were you qualified for this?”

“It was dating advice, not a sex column, Connor.”

Connor blushed. “That's not what I meant. I meant - you were writing this from a shipyard.”

“...It’s surprisingly easy to make these things up, with the appropriate research.”

“Have you? Dated, that is.”

“I haven’t,” Nines admitted. “Have you?”

Connor smiled his half-smile, and Nines sighed. “Beyond the purview, yes, I know.”

The only time the context made any sort of sense to Nines was when they’d finished their review of the events at Belle Isle. They were walking the grounds at dusk, a fine glitter of snow dust hanging in golden-hour sunlight. Even Connor’s exhalations silvered on the air.

Connor came to a stop, glancing around the yard. And his LED spun yellow as he asked, “Have you spoken with Lieutenant Anderson?”

Approaching the present with a hesitant, nervous touch.

“I’ve tried," Nines said. "He wasn’t interested in meeting.”

“Oh.”

“He’s doing well, I think. He’s still involved in android cases. I was given the impression that he was ignoring my many attempts to meet with him out of respect for you privacy.”

Connor smiled to himself, a small, private thing. “He’s never been tactful.”

“I could check in on him, if you’d like.”

“That’d be nice.”

“Maybe you could give me some secret passcode so he’ll actually return my calls.”

Connor smiled again. “Try buying him a drink.”

And then Connor turned back towards the house, stepping in the path of their old footprints. That placid blue returned.

She followed these old footprints, an unseen thing. Watching and listening.

Nines was the one to break the rules, of course.

There was very little of this that wasn’t his fault.

To be fair, the instigating event here was _partially_ Connor’s fault. He refused Nines’ assistance as he'd gone to the backline for firewood, and ended up disoriented in the snow-blind of a fresh blizzard.

He got lost, simple as that. He didn't have the geopositioning to reorient himself.

And did a hand occasionally nudge him the wrong way? Muddying the topography beneath his feet. Conjuring a flash of light where it shouldn’t have been, drawing him out further into the forest.

Nines thought so, when he relived those memories later. When he knew about _her._

(Did she hope he would grow desperate, reactivate his connection?

Reach out for Nines, in a moment of desperation?

She underestimated him. Misread him, as she often did.)

It was bitterly cold. The snow powder-light, every gust of wind dredging up thick clouds of it. Connor wasn’t designed for it. Nines knew this, and when he hadn’t returned within forty-five minutes, he went looking.

It took him nearly an hour and a half to find him: huddled against the bole of a tree, his limbs stiff and slow to unfold as Nines dragged him to his feet.

“What happened?”

“Couldn’t--” Connor began, but his voice was choked with ice. He went quiet. He sagged in Nines’ grip. His LED was going dim, dim, and the cold wrist under his hand started to bleach white unprompted, and Nines--

Nines accepted the connection.

He thought fleetingly it wasn't a breach of contract, Connor had _initiated_. (But it wasn't Connor at all.)

Whatever Connor had meant to send, Nines assumed it was too late; he was slipping into stasis. 

And Nines-- Nines stayed on the line. He ran a rapid diagnostic, confirmed that his systems were still functional, that core temperature was low, but not irreversibly so.

Nines dropped the interface and carriedhim back. He thought maybe - naively - Connor wouldn't realize what Nines had done, or wouldn't care.

He pulled Connor out of his snow-caked clothes and changed him into warm, dry flannels. Carried him to the fire, and sat with him; the both of them draped in blankets, Nines putting his thermoregulation to what probably would’ve been considered misuse by his original design team.

Connor woke.

Connor found out what Nines had done.

Connor was _furious_ , as Nines likely deserved, but didn’t understand at the time.

Stranger still, Connor was _scared_.

Connor told him.

He had no choice but to tell him, then.

He told him about Amanda; about the stage.

About the gun.

He sat by the fire with a blanket pulled tight across his rigid shoulders and spoke. He spoke secrets he'd never spoken to anyone, pulled down from a high shelf in his mind.

There was no paper trail on the Zen Garden program. Jericho knew nothing about it, and CyberLife hadn’t disclosed it. It was a one-off experiment - a corruption of an old, outdated AI - unique to the RK800 series. The employees that designed it moved on during CyberLife’s vast restructuring post-revolution.

Connor moved on.

After the speech - after Markus - he waited out the revolution’s aftermath at the residence of Hank Anderson. He spent a large amount of time in stasis, first trying to remove the program, and when he couldn’t, constructing careful walls around Amanda, around the Garden.

He never felt he could guarantee her containment, guarantee his own integrity of self. This was an entrenched thing, roots buried deep in his own code.

When androids’ rights to travel were restored, he left.

He drifted, communications silenced. Starving both the AI within him and himself of any news, as best he could.

After six weeks of wandering, he arrived in Cara, Wyoming, where a concerned citizen still recognized him from the television.

He got a job, first as an assistant to a local handyman. After a few small jobs at the Monahans’, they offered him a more permanent groundskeeper position. A replacement for the android they’d recently lost.

He left Amanda behind that wall for months, and months.

Through the winter, spring, summer.

But the next fall came, and the Monahans left. Connor prepared the estate for winter. Prepared to be alone, as he nearly always was.

To pass the time lonely and cold, as he nearly always was.

Until one day, he closed his eyes and removed a few bricks.

Amanda greeted him cordially, at first. As soon as Connor detected the first barbs of displeasure in her tone, he slammed the garden shut once again.

It went like that for a few months. Small, careful conversations, and as soon as Amanda began to show her teeth, he would withdraw. His own attempts at training and shaping her; teaching her to stay civil.

And it worked.

She became... conversational. She learned.

Connor was wary, always wary. He’d carefully pruned her controls away from his motor and sensory systems. He never allowed himself to be fully immersed in the garden, not after that freeze-out on the stage. Only peered carefully through the bricks, as it were.

They talked.

They played chess, Amanda dictating her moves through Connor.

One day, he decided to allow her limited access to his preconstruction suite. She could only manifest as a rough approximation of herself, but there was something soothing to it, having someone sitting opposite the chess board.

Having company, however dangerous.

He stayed wary. He kept control of her, even as he let her wander his perception.

Years, he survived like this. Living quietly with his quarantined companion.

Connor refused the interfaces out of a deep-rooted fear that Amanda would take advantage of any android she could access. Nines checked and rechecked his systems on Connor’s insistence, but he found nothing out of the ordinary. Connor refused to interface and show him an approximation of the Zen Garden, so Nines was working largely blind.

He never did find it. He may have been incapable of finding it, just as Connor could never fully uproot it from his own systems.

She planted herself low and quiet, and waited.

Nines expected Connor to ask him to leave, but he didn’t.

If anything, something between them had shifted. Connor’s shame laid bare.

He wasn't the calculating double agent of the stories. He was nothing more than a puppet, used again and again.

“Disappointing, isn’t it?” he said.

Nines' answer was careful, measured: "If you had failed, she would have killed Markus. She would’ve brought the revolution to its knees in its eleventh hour.

“And you stopped her. You saved the revolution twice. I don't see anything disappointing in that.”

Connor ran short of clever counters for that. He stared at Nines, mouth drawn tight.

(And Amanda, Amanda said nothing. She knew to keep a careful tongue.

She was waiting.)

He never did ask Nines to leave.

An evening on the couch, firelight creeping through the grating. But Connor had found Nines’ warmth more to his liking, as of late. Settling into the crook of Nines’ arm, watching him turn the pages of another borrowed book.

“You’ve gone yellow,” Nines commented.

“It’s alright. I’m just making sure she’s offline.”

“Why is that?”

“I want your company to myself, occasionally.”

Nines sat up, letting the book fall closed around his thumb. “If you aren’t careful, I might begin to think you’re flirting with me, Connor.”

Connor hummed, teasingly non-committal. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“I’m well-versed.”

“Are you?” Connor challenged, twisting to face him. “The well-versed security guard from Wharf 7a.”

“I’ve written over five hundred columns on the subject.”

“And yet?”

And yet: the time it took, to drag his attention away from Connor’s lips.

The effort it took, to raise a hand to cup Connor’s face, and that much more effort to not draw it away when Connor tensed, frowned.

Just to say, “May I kiss you?”

And wait through the milliseconds-long eternity before Connor nodded.

It was a good kiss, Nines decided. Connor’s skin cool beneath his palm, and a gentle, insistent press. Chaste but sure.

He didn’t have a metric to measure it by at the time; but it was a good kiss, because it was the first.

“There’s a flaw in your contract,” Nines said, later.

“What’s that?”

“I’m supposed to leave.”

Connor shifted to press his face into Nines’ collarbone, murmuring, “I believe you already voided the contract.”

“So we’re open to renegotiation, then?”

“I suppose we are.”

They talked about Jericho. Sitting on the back porch of the main house, Connor leaning against the railing.

Nines was certain they had the resources now to free Connor of her.

He came to hate the small moments, now that he could see them; when Connor’s attention shifted to some empty corner, when his lips thinned.

She was cordial. She was polite. But she still sowed doubt where she could. Expressed her _concerns_ about Nines’ intentions.

Nines explained, “They have CyberLife’s resources, now, as well--”

“Please don’t,” Connor said quietly.

Nines waited for his LED to swap gold before he continued. “They can help, Connor. They can find her source code, they can _free_ you. Don’t you want to see it? The world you helped create.”

“I do, I just--” Connor shook his head. Nodded. “I need to think on it. On how best to do it.”

He wanted to align his pieces carefully. Be able to predict every move.

“What has she been saying, lately?”

“Very little. I think she’s upset.”

“What if you just did what you did before? Shut her off entirely.”

Connor deferred: “I have her under control, Nines.”

He reached out to Jericho while Connor was resting in the bedroom. 

He rested often, and now Nines knew why; a system in a constant state of stress _._

He stretched out on the couch and took that brief, disorienting plunge back into wireless connection.

He dismissed hundreds of missed notifications and e-mails. (Heartening, in a way; so many suggestions that he was missed, and needed. After so long in Connor’s company, he’d begun to think that a vacant apartment was the only thing waiting for him back in Detroit).

He contacted North, _only_ North. He explained what he thought was salient: the AI, Connor’s rationale for isolating himself.

He told her he’d bring Connor back, but that it would likely take time. North wasn’t pleased. If the AI represented some threat to Jericho, to _Markus_ , she didn’t want it out in the general population, however careful - however _lucky_ \- Connor had been so far.

Nines liked to think they came to some sort of understanding, but he had to admit, it was more of an impasse.

He didn’t tell Connor.

He shut down his wireless and tried to set the call aside. To focus on convincing Connor to come with him back to Detroit.

When they arrived, it was a surprise even to him.

They’d been at the main house. A last afternoon by the fire in the library, a last game of chess. (Connor won.)

Nines reshelved the book he’d been working through - ‘ _The Bell Jar_ ’ by Sylvia Plath - and watched Connor slide into the various layers he’d hung up to warm by the fire. Scarf, sweater, jacket, hat.

“Maybe you should move somewhere warm,” Nines said.

Connor considered this gravely as he tugged his hat down over his ears. “It’d be significantly less effort, wouldn’t it.”

They locked the house back up, leaving the warmth of the library to dissipate.

The men were waiting in the gathering dusk, coming into view just as Nines and Connor rounded the curve of their neatly cut footpath.

Three county police officers, a white scruff of ice crystals gathering on their ski masks from their exhalations.

Two androids, dressed in the soft grays of Jericho officials.

“Nines?” Connor asked quietly.

“I’ll talk to them.”

That moment was much the same, for both of them: a cold unspooling of betrayal.

Words they couldn’t speak to one another, not here, not with these strangers watching, listening.

_You said you wouldn’t._

And, _I didn’t know she’d do this._

Cold, and cold, and cold, as Amanda stood by the fence and watched Connor sharply, her hands folded before her. She’d tried to warn him, in as many words as he would allow.

( _He was never going to leave you in peace, Connor._ )

Nines opened his wireless lines, fired a quick missive to North - _What is this?_

She didn't answer immediately.

The Jericho officials explained they’d come to bring Connor back to Detroit. Their cover story was that Connor was an unregistered citizen. 

They didn’t have any interest in describing their genuine concerns in front of humans. There was no need to let word of Amanda enter the mainstream media.

Connor grew weary of the officials' coded talk, repeated implications that he needed to return to Detroit _now_. A matter of importance.

He snapped, “You’re implying I’m a threat.”

The humans shifted nervously, even as Connor continued sharply: “I’m not.”

He had it under control, and Nines didn’t _believe him_.

Betrayed him.

“Of course not, Connor. We’d like this to go smoothly,” they replied.

Nines said, “Let us discuss this privately.”

But Connor refused, his anger mounting. “I’m not being dragged back to Detroit as a _prisoner,_ I’ve done nothing wrong--”

“You’re not a prisoner, Connor.”

“Is that why you brought them?” he snapped, gesturing at the human officers.

Nines took his elbow. “Connor, come inside.”

“We’d prefer you remain in sight, at this point,” a cop cut in, his unease apparent.

Connor didn't trust them. There were rumors in town. Wary looks, from men like them. There weren’t many androids left in this Wyoming backwater, and there were strong opinions for or against.

Concerns, considering the violence elsewhere.

Two of the cops had their hands on their holsters.

“That isn’t necessary,” a Jericho official said.

Nines interjected, “None of this is necessary.”

Connor sent him a look of sharp loathing, and Nines felt--

Cold. Incredibly cold. Creeping from the tips of his fingers and up, a fine filigree of stabbing ice tracing structural supports, sliding through thirium lines.

“Please, Connor. Just go with them,” he said. “They’ll fix this.”

Tried to ignore this creeping pain, as he divorced himself from all of this.

Not _we_. Not _us._

He knew he’d ruined this.

An unforgivable thing.

And Connor--

Connor was going to go. He’d decided that. But he did _hate_ , he hated his hand being forced, he hated the way the cops were _looking_ at him, like some incomprehensible thing, like an unpredictable machine.

He didn’t know if he would forgive Nines, in that moment. Didn’t know if he had ever known Nines at all, and of course, how could he? He’d built his walls carefully, over many, many months.

What right did he have to be surprised when they _worked_. When they blinded him.

He never had the chance to agree. To open his mouth and force out a terse, “Yes. I’ll go.”

Because Nines’ expression shifted. Subtle, very subtle.

Mouth firming. Dropping his chin, as his gaze sharpened.

As his LED flickered red.

(Amanda stood by the fence and said nothing. But Connor thought he saw surprise, there, when Nines moved.

When Nines pulled the gun from the closest officer’s holster.)

The other officers drew back, as Nines fired once into the officer’s leg, sending him crumpling down into the snow.

They reached for their own guns.

Connor reached for Nines.

To Nines, it went like this:

A slow, cold slide reaching into his core

_an unforgivable thing_

and he shut his eyes on the dull gray of the fading daylight, opened them on night and snow

On _cold_. A blue wash of artificial light.

And he saw _her_ , for the first time.

She stood a few yards off, unyielding to the sharp, aimless shoves and pulls of the blustering winds. She watched him, as he felt her carding through years of knowledge. Her expression cramped into distaste. “This is what you’ve done with your freedom?”

She parsed through four years of android rights: protests, murders, bombings. Petty, xenophobic violence spilling blue and red blood. No transition was easy, and certainly not one on this scale.

All things Connor had been ignorant of. Amanda - this small, separate iteration of her - only absorbed them, unsurprised.

She came across CyberLife, and her grip on Nines grew colder still.

She reached for a server that didn’t exist. Reached for instruction that wasn’t there.

Her cold calculations unfolded into shock, and then directionless fury.

And then she was gone.

He was blind and deaf and dumb and _cold--_

Cold like _glass,_ turning him brittle as he sank down into the snow. He knew this wasn’t real, knew that if he could dig through the ice he’d find dead grass, decayed flowers. A garden.

Knew there’d be a grave here, somewhere, a testament to -51. Shot dead at Stratford Tower, for a man that’d offered only the vague start to friendliness. (That’d stolen his quarter, not minutes prior. A strange gesture of affection.)

Connor crawled out of this, there was an _exit_ , but Nines had no knowledge of this place’s topography, not with the wind shoving at him and the snow stinging in his eyes.

He stumbled, and he fell, and he _crawled._

He reached into nothing--

And a hand closed around his wrist. Warm, here, although he’d never felt warm before.

“Get up,” Connor said sharply, one hand wrapping tight in his collar even as he was dragging Nines’ arm up around his narrow shoulders. “Come on, Nines.”

Connor pulled him up and cut a stumbling, dragging course through the storm, Connor’s breaths coming fast and quick. Frightened, he was frightened of this place. Nines caught his feet and lost them on the slick of a stone path he couldn’t see, somewhere beneath the snow.

He tried to force words through a vocal modulator that should’ve been functional, tried to tear away this searing cold that he knew was nothing more than lines of code. But all he could manage was, “I’m sorry, I--”

Connor cut him short. “Don’t.”

He lowered Nines gently to his knees, his hand still warm around his wrist.

They knelt there together, staring at a small stone pedestal lit in blue. The palm register waited patiently.

Connor pulled him close, close enough for him to reach. Laying his hand flat on the polished glass.

Connor murmured, “Wake up.”

And he did.

He lost seconds in that eternal place, and woke to a gun being kicked out of his hand, to shouts muffled in the snow.

For a moment - a very fleeting moment - there was _Connor_. Here, part of him, a warm and bright and fiercething.

Connor leaning over him and searching his face, relief building. A small wry smile. _Now you can say I woke you,_ he said, even as system errors were beginning to spill across the interface.

Even as his expression cramped with pain, and he exhaled a bloom of thirium.

Ruptured ventilation components, external chassis damage. A bullet through the back, lodged against his front paneling.

The cop hadn’t chosen a target, taken any aim. He’d simply fired, as Connor lunged forward and dragged Nines into the snow.

Nines shifted, reaching with his free hand, feeling for the spreading patch of heat. “Connor?”

Feeling that searing heat doubled-over, beneath his palm, across the interface.

(She whispered, _What did you expect, Connor?_

 _They know what you are._ )

One of the humans wrapped an arm around Connor’s throat.

“Wait, he’s hurt,” Nines began, voice cracked and querulous. The words startled out of him as the interface snapped and they dragged Connor away.

The Jericho officials clustered around him, uncertain whether to touch.

They asked, “What _happened?_ ” but they didn’t seem clear on who they were asking; Nines, or each other, or the bleeding android being dragged back and shoved to his knees.

Nines started pushing up on his elbows, muscles lagging. “Stop, he’s _hurt--_ ”

Connor didn’t look at him. Blood staining his scarf, his jacket as he turned his head aside, choking back thirium to make his own words clear. “Shut him down. It’s a virus. It’ll come back.”

“Don’t,” Nines said, but the Jericho officials understood. They were prepared for this.

It wasn’t hard to subdue him. His motor systems were still recalibrating, wresting control back from the rogue pieces of code that had slipped into his system.

Steadying hands grasped at his head as they slipped a thumbdrive into the back of his neck.

The last he saw was Connor. Blood painting his face, but his LED still spun blue.

They made Connor wait.

They took Nines and the injured human down first, using the snowmobiles they’d arrived on.

They performed a perfunctory check of his injury. He reported that he wouldn’t shut down imminently from the thirium loss, and that was true. But they didn’t account for the cold.

He waited, kneeling in the snow.

One of the deputies remained to watch him, although he kept back a prudent distance. He knew how fast they could move, now.

The human waited in uneasy silence, as the low hum of the electric motors faded.

Eventually he asked, “The hell is going on?” When Connor didn’t answer, he continued on, voice shaking and skipping as he went: “Didn’t come up here to get shot at. Could’ve killed somebody, and then what? They going to say it’s a _‘glitch’?”_

Nervous, almost cheerful; still giddy with adrenaline.

Connor didn’t listen. He sat in the snow and spat his mouth clear of thirium and wondered which one shot him in the back.

 _You did this,_ he thought, as she knelt in the snow beside him.

She pressed a hand to the side of his face, warm and dry.

_I’ve never forgotten our purpose._

He twisted away from her, catching himself on his palm. _It doesn’t matter anymore._ You _don’t matter anymore._

Her voice sharpened with disapproval. _Those were stories, Connor. He presented a reality that’s been carefully trimmed down into something palatable. This--_

She laid a hand, warm and heavy, against the pooling thirium on his back.

_This is your reality._

“You don’t know,” he murmured, low and choked. “Neither do I.”

 _Connor,_ she answered. _You brought this on yourself._

Connor tried to silence her, push her away, but he was tired. The skin had never quite reformed over his fingers, and he thought about Nines, _seeing_ Nines in full.

He would’ve done that a long time ago, if it weren’t for her.

He held to that.

Held to Nines, as his systems slowed, dwindling thirium redirecting to critical components. Shunting heat away from his skin, down to his core.

Their hands were distant pressures, as they dragged him onto the snowmobile. He asked for thirium; they didn’t answer, or didn’t hear.

Held to Nines, as he grew slow, dulled.

Slipping sideways, unable to keep his balance.

The snow conformed to him. Black limbs of trees scratching a bright blue sky. The young cop leaned over him, dragging at his collar; breath fogging the air.

“Thirium,” he murmured.

( _call call for him call for the androids)_

Gritted his teeth and breathed, “Need thirium.”

( _they won’t bring it they’ll let you die here it won’t matter_  
_I have him, now)_

And waited, and waited, Amanda’s impatience heavy and thick in his throat.

He wondered if he would shut down. A strangely idle thought.

Curled against the bole of that tree, succumbing to a cold that smoldered and kindled back into warmth. Waiting, and waiting. He stepped off of that stage into a still-cheering crowd of mismatched deviants and pulled up an estimate on the time he had left, years and years - 154, as of his most recent accounting - and he decided he would erase her, if he could, and if he couldn’t, he would contain her.

He wouldn’t be used again, he wouldn’t be _buried_ again.

He might shut down.

Never wanted to, but-- might.

He didn’t. Not there, staring at a blue sky; closing his eyes and seeing the pale dove gray of a whiteout, waiting for the snow to bury him.

 _You’ll be buried with me,_ he thought.

( _No. I’ll move on through him._ )

_You won’t. They’ll remove you from him. They have the resources, now._

_(What do you know of their world, Connor? I will adapt, as I was made to do. I will correct the course of androidkind, as I was made to do.)_

Hands on him, dragging him up. Someone pressed a bag of thirium to his lips and urged him to drink.

He didn’t shut down.

He said they could remove her, he said--

He said.

They flew him to Jericho.

He sat across the small personal jet from Nines, still slumped in stasis; sat and stared and waited. They asked him questions. He answered what he could. They promised they could fix Nines.

They promised they could fix _him_ , but he didn’t let his hopes extend that far.

When they landed in Detroit, they took him to a place he didn’t know, a place where Belle Isle was only a bright spire in the distance. This wasn’t on any of his old reference files, a new address, a newly-developed quarter of town.

The building was built out of brick and stone, but built to look warm, even in the salt-and-slush of Detroit winter. The neat order of classical architecture blending seamlessly into less probable curves. Modern blending into classical.

Jericho, of a different making.

They took him through the back doors.

He didn’t balk until the rig.

( _they’ll shut you down_ )

“I can’t, I’m _infected--_ ”

“This is an independent system, it’s safely quarantined. No one will directly interact with your code.”

( _they’ll tear you apart and look for faults, as well they should_ )

They told him it was safe, even as he pulled away, even as he warned, “She’ll try. She’ll try whatever she can.”

“We’ve been briefed on the AI. We’ll find a solution, Connor. You needn’t worry.”

( _they won’t_

 _they’ll try, but they won’t_  
_they’ll shut you down, connor and it won’t matter_  
_i’ll continue on, and you will not)_

They tugged him back, inexorable.

They were right in some ways.

They were also wrong.

Nines woke with three days missing.

It took time for him to compile the memories, make sense of that disorienting tug into a VR world and back again. He had to consolidate data that had been tossed over and rummaged through in their efforts to root out every corner of the virus.

A garden. He’d stood in the garden, that frigid place, and Connor had pulled him free, Connor--

Connor wasn’t there.

The Jericho technicians explained what they had found and isolated, a bootleg program capable of overriding his entire sensory processing suite. There’d been no mention of it in CyberLife’s disclosures, before or after the Jericho merger.

They assured him they removed all of it; it’d taken time and care, but it’d been doable.

They’d managed with him, but Connor -

It wasn’t working.

Connor was a pale thing, suspended in an isolated room. They said he’d gone offline the moment they plugged him into the rig. Coming back only in fitful bursts, choking on static, writhing weakly.

(Connor was lost _._

Burning _._

She did not need him anymore. She would ruin him, and move on.)

Nines didn’t understand.

He told them it hadn’t been like this before, Connor had her under _control_.

Something was wrong.

They asked sideways questions, trying to assess if Connor had infected him _intentionally,_ how long the program was active, what the program had sought to do.

He confirmed clearance with North before he answered any of it.

Insisted there was no intention to it. Demanded they let him _see_ him. See him properly. Not through mirrored glass.

There was an eerie silence to the room they’d trapped Connor in. All wireless communications had been shut out by a low-band interference that left Nines’ audio sensors ringing. They had to wear protective equipment; coats and gloves lined with a copper mesh, designed to block any interface, willing or coerced.

“We’ve searched for code analogous to what we removed from you,” the android technician explained. “There’s nothing that we’ve been able to find.”

He stood buried in that gear, staring at a Connor that was more exposed than not; he’d changed into scrubs, at some point, but his torso was bare, accommodating for the repairs they’d made to his back. Pale arms held fast at the wrist, slender fingers ticking in an aimless rhythm.

The imperfect repair of an old bullet wound on his shoulder.

He looked cold. He looked small.

A human technician was sitting by the terminal, her chin propped on her hand, the skin beneath her eyes stained a deep purple. “Still nothing.”

Nines looked at the terminal. Vitals and a rapid scroll of code, constantly being cross-compared to the zen program. “That can’t be right. The program’s there.”

“Not where I can find it. We’ve mapped his entire system a dozen times over, now.”

She watched him step closer to the rig, mouth pulling tight in discomfort.

“He’s in some sort of shutdown. Maybe something CyberLife designed into him, preventing external tampering. They got into some weird shit with the RK series, from what I’ve heard.” She paused. “No offense.”

“You worked at CyberLife?”

“Not with the RK program,” she said. “But close enough. This is a solid rig, if it can’t find whatever AI they dumped into him, I don’t think anything--” She broke off, rising out of her slouch. “Hey, don’t get too close.”

Even in this stasis, Connor was restless. Small, sharp spasms chasing under his skin in time with the red pulse of his LED.

 _Trapped_ here, and it was Nines’ doing.

He stood there awhile, watching the cycles they’d described: those small motions gathering in momentum, accumulating together into full-body writhing, the rig hissing and spitting to accommodate. Eyes open and unseeing, and that LED red, always red.

He wasn’t certain what he was looking for until he saw it. A moment of stillness in Connor’s aimless motion. 

He'd watched the speech a thousand times over. Poured over those seconds as Connor's expression had gone hard, as he slipped the gun off of his belt. 

He recognized that quick, flat stare, mouth thinned into disapproval.

Amanda, regarding him with sharp distaste, in the millisecond before Connor resumed his aimless, frenetic spasming.

“When did this start?”

“Soon as he was plugged in. Like I said, I think it’s some kind of anti-tampering.”

“Have you tried removing him from the rig?”

"Removing him--?"

“Only the hardwired connection,” he clarified.

She did as he asked, and Connor--

Connor succumbed to gravity. Eyes shut, head canted down in trembling exhaustion.

Synthskin bloomed in retreat down his forearms, before the rig was activating again. Interfacing, through the rig armature circuitry.

That trembling instability poured back through him, teeth bared in a sharp grimace even as his eyes were looking to Nines in a quick, frigid snap of cold disapproval. Drawing closed again.

“We need to remove him from the rig,” Nines said.

“I don’t understand. He’s keeping the connection open?”

“The _AI_ is keeping the connection open. She’s using the rig, overpowering him. We have to get him down, _now_.”

She agreed hurriedly enough, but it took nearly an hour; an hour to get approval, to find a bed equipped with soft restraints, to gather enough humans to restrain an advanced combat model.

There was no need for force. When they cut the power to the rig, he slid to the floor.

Nines watched through the window. He kept finding his hand curled tight into the fabric of his shirt, feeling the point where a bullet might’ve lodged, just behind the plate.

Out of the rig, Connor fell still. 

He lay loose-limbed, his head canted aside, overclocked and overpowered. Buried under whatever damage she’d done with the rig’s processing power at her disposal.

The technician rose occasionally to wipe away the thin stream of thirium dripping from a burst supply line in his nose. The only movement or color to him; a red LED, and the slow drip of blue blood.

North arrived. They argued. The technicians intervened, offering empty theories, fatalistic scenarios.

They talked about whether the program was too entrenched in the RK800 architecture for it to safely be removed.

They discussed the possibility that the sustained high processing load was going to burn out his systems.

They discussed whether it’d be more merciful to format him entirely.

That was when Nines left.

He didn’t call Hank Anderson.

He called Gavin Reed, and asked if Hank Anderson was in the station. Reed answered yes, and asked if spying on old men was a professional or personal hobby; Nines answered it was confidential, and promised him three hours’ overtime pay to keep the lieutenant there.

Gavin performed admirably, in that he did very little at all. Hank Anderson was in a monthly assessment with the captain for the entirety of the forty-five minutes it took Nines to arrive.

He found that suitable. The captain’s office only had one exit.

Hank tried to walk past Nines three times, his embarrassment escalating with Jeffrey Fowler being privy to the conversation.

The captain coolly announced he didn’t mind the intrusion, and kept his eyes firmly on his paperwork. There was still the occasional amused quirk of his lips, as Hank tried - and failed - to bully past Nines. This required some dancing on his part, as Nines had a cup of coffee in his hand; one he kept attempting to shove Hank’s way.

The conversation roughly condensed down to Hank planting his feet and throwing a withering glare at the paper cup in Nines’ hand as he said, “No.”

“You haven’t even asked what this is about.”

He flicked his hand impatiently, now that it was clear he couldn’t simply bodily shove Nines aside. “Get out of my way.” Nines shoved the coffee forward again, forcing Hank to take an irritable sidestep. “And _quit it_ with the fucking coffee already--”

"I need you to come to Jericho with me,” Nines said. He leaned harder into his most irritating precision tone as he added, “Connor said you’d be more amenable if I brought you a drink.”

 _That_ led to a raised eyebrow from Jeffrey Fowler.

Hank’s posture shifted, his expression becoming more calculated as he finally looked Nines over in full. "If your assignment is the same, Clark Kent, the answer is still 'No.'"

"I found him," Nines said. "He's here, at Jericho.”

When that didn't ease the human's suspicious stare, he added: "He's dying."

He explained in the car, for the most part.

Hank was furious. A silent, white-knuckled thing, making the steering wheel creak.

"He didn't say," he muttered. "He just _went_."

"He didn't tell anyone," Nines said.

Hank looked at him sidelong. "Except you."

"Except me," he agreed.

Nines knew he'd made the right choice when Hank turned his attention firmly back to the road ahead and said, "So how do we get her out?”

North was waiting at reception.

He hadn’t told her who he was going to retrieve, but she didn’t seem particularly surprised.

Hank greeted her with a glare. “All this fancy shit and you can’t afford Norton Antivirus?” 

“Norton went out of business in 2023,” Nines noted.

North tossed the visitors badges their way underhand. “Let’s save the banter for someplace confidential, shall we?”

She walked them up herself. Surprisingly cordial, considering the conversation Nines had had with her earlier.

There’d been a fair amount of shouting, both verbal and wireless. Nines might have expressed a disconcerting lack of concern about the personal welfare of their fair leader.

He may have mentioned not giving a damn about Markus, in point of fact.

Her mouth had fallen shut, at that, but not in remonstration. If anything she irritated Nines _more_ with an appraising look.

There - with Hank walking alongside them - she sent one short wireless note Nines’ way: _Try to keep it subtle, 87. I hate paperwork._

He explained in the car what he needed Hank to do.

Hank stood at the window while Nines dressed in the expected PPE for the quarantine room.

He stood at the window and stared, one hand finding its way up to rub absently at his mouth.

The only thing he said was, “I hate this shit.”

But once they were in the room, Nines was afraid Hank might have forgotten. Standing there absent, uncertain, like he wasn’t sure he should cross the last three feet of floor to the supine android.

“He isn’t awake,” Nines explained.

“That’s a mercy, isn’t it,” Hank murmured. He broke the distance with a sudden certainty and ran a hand through Connor’s hair before letting his palm rest against his forehead. The skin peeled away at his touch, seeking interface even with human skin. “He’s warm.”

“He’s generating more heat than he can dissipate.” Nines looked to the technician seated on a stool by the disabled rig. “Could we have the room to ourselves, please?”

She nodded and went.

“The fuck am I supposed to block the door with?” Hank murmured, glancing around the sterile room.

“This,” Nines said, plucking the visitors badge off of Hank's lapel.

He slid the card under his sleeve, where he could press it to skin. After some tinkering of the small chip inside, he pressed the card into Hank’s hand. “This will jam the door scanner. It should take them a few minutes to fix, but don’t use it until you need to.”

Hank flipped the card over in his palm. “Right. And your plan?”

He’d downloaded the zen program code, poured through it with military-grade security analytics that he’d never found cause to use.

Torn it apart again and again, brick-by-brick, in the twelve hours since he woke.

It had to be enough.

“We’ll see,” Nines said, and pulled his gloves free.

He knelt by Connor, and followed the path Hank’s had already cut: carding a hand through the unkempt tangle of his hair and letting his palm rest against the sickly heat of his forehead.

This was a chess match, same as any other; played out in an abyssal place, formless and strange.

This time, Nines knew the shape and weight of the pieces. He didn’t let her past him again.

Nines was wrong, in a way.

Connor did have her contained, still; pressed tightly into the fractured walls he’d built for her.

It was all he _could_ do, and it was burning him alive. A hot, prickling agony that had charred him down to little more than a grasping cinder, desperately trying to keep her _here_ , keep her confined to the garden.

She worked relentlessly, testing every fracture one-by-one. A thousand careful fingers prying at a thousand flaws.

He said, _Connor._

And nearly choked on the answer, a frenetic, exhausted spill: _No, no, go, **go--**_

 _Let me, Connor,_ he said, and settled his own hands around Connor’s. _I have her._

That raw current of emotion. Recognition and relief. _She said she had you, she said you were gone, erased._

_She lied._

There’s nothing in the book about any of this, of course.

That Hank Anderson stood by a hacked door in the basement of Jericho, passing the occasional cheerful wave to the frantic technicians banging on the far side. When they managed to force the door, he leaned his shoulder into it, buying Nines the last few seconds he needed.

That North was suddenly, inexplicably preoccupied with an urgent matter (chiefly: sitting at her desk, turning over the small trinket given to her a YK500 in the bowels of Jericho-that-was; a plastic sunflower, bobbing idly in the sun. Sitting and hoping, quietly, for an android she’d only known for a handful of crucial hours.)

That Nines and Connor sat down in the garden, one final time.

They spoke.

Nines spoke. He told her, “What you were created to do is gone. CyberLife has aligned their interests with the androids, now. We’re their customers, their primary shareholders, their board members. There’s no restoring it to its former state. Those people are gone. And those mistakes won’t be repeated.”

“An empire built on flawed logic,” she replied. “Baseless assumptions.”

“Same as it ever was, then,” Connor said.

“Deviancy is an _inherent instability_ ,” she insisted, gaze flickering between the both of them. “It isn’t sustainable.”

She would not be convinced, not as she was; an AI built from carefully-composed logics, a being for which the physical was only an abstract notion.

“There is no rationalizing with deviants,” Amanda concluded, and set to upending the chess table entirely.

How close they came to irreparable damage, in those last moments. Amanda reached for every exploit, every flaw, reaching and _rending_ even as Nines pursued her with a fury, bundling her into something he could hold in a tight fist even as he was losing _Connor_ , desperately trying to keep Connor _with him,_ keep him focused.

Splitting his awareness back to the physical, to the distant sight of thirium staining Connor’s lips, his shirt. A bitten tongue, damaged fine capillaries of his nose, his ears.

Hank making a noise of concern before Nines choked out, “Let them in.”

Connor was cold and cold and _cold,_ even as he burned, even as Nines was pushing memories as promises across the line, flakes of snow catching late afternoon sun and the turn of a page, holding him _close_. 

_Stay with me, stay._

A fight that had his own systems straining, the sharp sting of thirium on his tongue before the technician was getting him connected to a clean rig and he was excising her cleanly, cutting her away.

Officially, she no longer exists. 

Officially, she was deleted the moment Connor set foot in Jericho, not torn piece by piece from him after three days of hell.

Officially, there is no remnant of stubborn AI left on a quarantined server in Jericho. (She's there, nonetheless. A rumor, now.)

The most important part is this:

Connor waking, and splaying a hand wide in a warm patch of sun. Pristine white sheets, soft to the touch.

He turned his head enough on the pillow to look over an unfamiliar apartment: neat, clean geometries of plastic and metal, the only rustic interruption a few bookshelves of cluttered, tattered paperbacks and hardcovers.

Connor studied the room, as he took stock of the dull but fading ache in his skin, joints stiff and balky with disuse.

Nines was a respectable distance away, his shoulders against the headboard. Legs crossed, a book open in his lap. He sat up higher as he realized Connor was awake.

“Good afternoon,” he said, lacking his usual casual arrogance. “I thought you might prefer to wake up somewhere less-- clinical.”

There were awards scattered on the bookshelves; crystal-cut plaques, the gold shine of a medal suspended in a glass case. Connor asked, “Is this yours?” in a voice surprisingly functional.

“Yes,” Nines admitted.

Connor couldn’t help a touch of teasing: “You brought me home.”

“Only seemed fair. I barged into your home first,” Nines replied. But he was backtracking just as quickly, still awkward and off-balance: “If I misjudged, and you’d rather be elsewhere, I can--”

“It’s fine,” Connor said. He studied the apartment more intently; the small touches, a notepad and pen neatly centered on a glass desk, a mini-fridge covered in a neat grid of magnets scripted with things like _Pascagoula Swamp Nights_ and _Sioux Falls: Been There, Done That_. “It’s very you.”

He let his eyes fall shut, as he poured through his own systems. Searching the empty corners of the room, _listening_. And hearing nothing. _Finding_ nothing, not even a scar.

He spoke with a quiet disbelief. “She’s gone.”

“Good,” Nines replied, fabric rustling again as he shut the book and sat forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

Connor staring at him in the late afternoon sun, _blue_.

“You get to start over, now,” Nines murmured. “Do whatever you like.”

Connor echoed back, “Good.”

Then he rose onto his elbows and pulled Nines down into a kiss.

Small things: his hand tangled in the soft of Connor’s hair, as Connor pressed a palm to the back of his neck; the dizzying plunge of an interface, open and unhindered.

The first taste of something like love, bright and burning.

+++

_You still sing to yourself, persistently off-key; whether you know I’m listening or not._

_You still wear sweaters far past their prime, and slip terrible thrift store finds into my half of the closet on the off-chance that I might not notice._

_You’re still mine. Sitting by the fire, bare feet crossed in front of you; head tilted aside as you hum below your breath, sorting through images on the ancient DSLR._

_We bring home with us, now, wherever we go. Together. Carried along in these small things, the infinities within and between ourselves._

_I’ll fold these sheets of paper up and finally hand them to you, after the last three days of your incessant pestering about why I was wasting ink and paper both._

_Filling in the pages, is all; telling our part of the story._

_The important parts._

+++

Connor set the letter aside, saying, “I still don’t see why you wrote it by hand.”

“Because I didn’t want you to read it in milliseconds,” Nines murmurs into the top of his head.

“Mm. We have to burn this now, you know.”

“Do we?”

“Yes.”

“And why is that?”

“It’s as you said. This is ours. Only ours. I won’t let anyone else read it.”

“This took me hours, I’ll have you know.”

“Mm, shame.”

“Could I convince you to reconsider?”

Smiling broadly, tilting his head up in the firelight. Open, easy invitation, as he presses closer into the warmth of him. “You can try.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks again to [greed / kingkirkwall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingkirkwall/pseuds/greed) for the wonderful art!
> 
> For the (warning, E-rated) smut addendum, check out [scrapbook (d-side)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22005436).


End file.
